Jake slipped his Budweiser T-shirt back over his head and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said charitably.
She smirked lovingly at his never-ending optimism. “Nobility of the poor, right?”
“Well, there’s certainly no shame in it.” Jake sounded a little defensive. “For all we know, these people work three jobs to afford what little they’ve got.”
“Whatever,” she scoffed.
He recognized her tone as the one that dismissed his outlook on such things as naive and ill informed. It was a quirk in his wife’s personality that he’d never been able to understand. She’d set a standard for herself that no mere mortal could possibly attain, and even as they wallowed together in that stage of their lives where an evening out for pizza and beer had to be carefully budgeted, she showed a disturbing, almost cruel intolerance for people who were “poor.” Every time Jake tried to point out that their income hovered perilously close to the poverty line, she’d insist that he was missing the point. It was their potential that made the difference, she’d say. As college graduates, with degrees in a worthwhile, technical field, they had limitless potential. The fact that Jake’s father had spent a career in the coal mines, working night shift until the day he died, and that his mom had cleaned houses to make ends meet didn’t seem to impress Carolyn in the slightest. She was funny that way. Jake figured it all had something to do with her childhood; something that twisted her outlook on the world. In all other ways a charitable, giving wife, Carolyn could be brutal where money was the issue.
Jake let it pass. “Where do you think we are?”
Carolyn craned her neck, as if she’d be able to recognize this stretch of river by sight. “No idea,” she said at length. “Downstream from where we were before.” She smiled, lighting up the whole boat. All the snottiness and intolerance in the world couldn’t cheapen the pure beauty of that smile, Jake thought.
A few minutes passed before the horizon changed again, revealing a line of dilapidated shops, which, like the surrounding residences, were built right up against the edge of the river. The tallest of the structures also looked to be the oldest, built of stone at its lowest level, with two additional stories stacked on top, sporting faded wood siding and a once-red, hand-painted sign, “Bobby’s Bait and Tackle.”
“Hey, look,” Jake said, pointing. “Let’s go see if Bobby’s has a phone we can use.” He steered the canoe toward shore, running it aground against the gravel parking lot, where it joined the waterline. He got out first, holding the boat steady as Carolyn joined him. Together, they pulled the canoe safely ashore and chicken-walked through the gravel, unconsciously flapping their elbows as they guided their bare feet across the sharp-edged rocks. Thirty yards later the gravel gave way to smooth concrete, and they paused to let the pain subside.
“Welcome to Buford,” Carolyn said.
Jake cocked his head. “How do you know that?”
She giggled and pointed across the street. “Buford Hardware.” Then, pointing two blocks down the street, “Buford Motel.”
“Your powers of deduction are truly awesome,” he teased. “How do you know that some guy named Buford doesn’t own a hardware store and a motel?”
She shot him her know-it-all smirk. “People named Buford don’t own businesses.”
The town was bigger than Jake had expected. Stretching on for several blocks in three directions, it sported an interesting mix of old business district construction, with its tall false fronts and wrought-iron fencing, interspersed with the pastel and glass architecture of the sixties. The mining town where Jake grew up had been a lot smaller than this, and it bragged ten thousand residents. Using that as a benchmark, he pegged Buford-if indeed that’s what it was called-to be good for about twenty. All the more remarkable, given the fact that not a soul was in sight.
“Where is everybody?” Carolyn asked, speaking Jake’s thoughts.
“Kinda spooky, isn’t it?” Bobby’s Bait and Tackle, like every other building in sight, was locked tight, with the lights off. “Didn’t I see a Twilight Zone that started like this?”
Carolyn shivered inadvertently, and then she got it. “They must have been evacuated!” she proclaimed. “The fire down at the plant must have run them off.”
Jake scowled. “Jeeze, you think so? This far away?”
“Well, we really don’t know how far away we are. Five miles is a long way.”
“And this is a big town,” he finished for her. “What a nightmare getting all these people moving.” He placed his hands on his hips and looked up and down the street. “Do you see a pay phone?”
With none in sight, they started moving toward the Buford Motel. Surely, they’d have one there. They walked quickly, gripped by an odd paranoia. The total absence of people, at a time when the streets rightfully should have been packed, felt strangely post-apocalyptic. Jake half expected to see Mad Max appear with his band of refugees.
Could it be that the contamination had actually extended this far? Five miles was the default evacuation distance for hazmat disasters, and as such carried a safety factor of at least five, meaning that the evacuation zone encompassed five times the distance that was truly in danger. Was it possible, in this case, that wind directions or thermal inversions, or any number of other physical or meteorological anomalies, had actually put them in harm’s way?
They discussed these things as they wandered across the street, but Jake was the one who put it in the proper perspective: “Too late to start worrying about it now. If this is a danger zone, then we’ve been exposed all day.”
Clearly, he and Carolyn had dodged the bullet for the most acute hazards of whatever they might have been exposed to. Now they’d just have to wait another twenty or thirty years to see what chronic effects might lie ahead. Cancer maybe. Or blindness. God, there were countless possibilities. Signs and symptoms could take decades to show themselves. In any case, that particular horse was out of the barn.
And that’s what made this such a scary business. Some of the most hazardous chemicals on earth were colorless, odorless, and tasteless, with toxic effects that took years to manifest themselves. How could a person know if the tumor that materialized after his sixty-fifth birthday was just another tumor, like the last three that the oncologist had treated, or if it was the result of some ancient chemical exposure?
The parking lot of the Buford Motel was deserted, just like everything else in town. A single story in height, the complex looked like every other motel constructed in the 1960s. A couple dozen rooms stretched out at parking lot level, anchored on the near end by a small, glass-walled office. Being this close to a bed and an air conditioner made Jake realize just how exhausted he was. Suddenly, each step took just a little more effort than his legs were willing to give.
“Not bad, all things considered,” he commented. Someone here had quite a green thumb. A sea of phlox and pansies surrounded the small swimming pool, itself an obvious afterthought, planted as it was smack in the middle of the parking lot. Geraniums grew in uniform clusters in colorful window boxes outside of every room.
“You suppose they rent for whole nights, or just for a few hours at a time?” Carolyn quipped.
Jake shook his head. “You’re such a snot.” He was careful to keep a smile in his voice.
She chuckled. “Well, I can afford to be snotty when I’m so fashionably dressed.” He hadn’t thought about it until that very minute, but they looked like hell. Sweaty, sunburned, barefoot, and filthy, they truly were quite a sight.
“I need a nap,” he said, reaching for the tinted glass door to the office. The door pulled open easily.
Like the building itself, the furniture was old yet clean. Sort of Early American, with some Colonial and Danish Modern thrown in for flavor.
“How nice,” Carolyn mumbled sarcastically.
“Shh,” Jake snapped. “Hello?” he called to the room. “Anybody here?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be here,” she whispered. “I feel like a burglar.”
“Well, hi there!” The two of them jumped a foot as the clerk materialized from behind the counter. Pushing seventy, with a genuine smile brightening his stubbly face, the guy looked way too old to be greeting visitors at the counter. “Sorry, folks. Didn’t mean to startle you. Name’s Terrell. Can I help you?” Terrell’s smile remained unchanged, but his eyes darkened as he took in his visitors’ appearance. “Y’all okay? You look sorta… Well, everythin’ okay?”
Carolyn opened her mouth to answer, but Jake touched her back lightly. “We’re fine, thanks,” he said. “But we’ve had a bit of an accident. Mind if we use your phone to call the police?”
Suddenly, Terrell’s smile disappeared, replaced with a deep, concerned scowl. He hurried out from behind his
